Enterprise solutions - AT & T launches 1 Gb/s bandwidth on demand

AT & T's business arm has launched a 1 Gb/s bandwidth on demand offering, as part of its year-old optical mesh offering, for its enterprise and wholesale customers.
The Optical Mesh Services offering lets customers reallocate bandwidth as needed by increasing or decreasing network capacity in what AT&T calls "near real time." It also lets enterprise customers build and self-administer their own SONET networks using the AT & T BusinessDirect customer portal.
AT&T said that the new 1 Gb/s speed is available at 275 locations around the country linked by what it calls its Intelligent Optical Network - a self-healing network with claimed five nines reliability.
A dynamic Layer 1 service helps companies trying to solve the dilemma of build versus buy. An on-demand optical solution with as much needed bandwidth is a compelling solution for mission-critical business applications with zero tolerance for downtime, as well as for business continuity.

U.K.'s DTH satellite-TV giant BSkyB has become Britain's fastest-growing broadband provider

U.K. direct-to-home (DTH) satellite-TV giant British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) has become Britain's fastest-growing broadband provider in less than a year, with broadband now driving overall growth of the company. In the three months ended June 30 (BkyB's fourth fiscal quarter), it had added a net of 259,000 new broadband subscribers, bringing its total broadband subscriber base to 716,000. It also added 171,000 telephony customers, bringing that total subscriber base to 526,000. In contrast, on the television side of the house, it reported a far lower growth rate and netted only 90,000 new subscribers (after taking into account a hefty churn rate of 12.1 percent, which at least was down a bit from 13.7 percent in the first three months). It now has some 8.6 million subscribers to its core DTH service.
BSkyB is adding more broadband customers than any other provider. The company, which jumped into telephony and broadband last year in order to have a triple-play bundle to fend off such competitors as BT and U.K. cable giant Virgin Media, is on track to reach it target of 3 million broadband subscribers and 10 million TV subscribers by 2010.

BSkyB now is delivering service from 1,150 BT exchanges where it has unbundled local loops, representing 70 percent coverage of U.K. households. The unbundling efforts are six months ahead of plan, the company touts.

Braodband satellite industry revenues to increase at an average annual rate of 11 percent during next five years !!

According to Northern Sky Research Ltd. (NSR), service revenue for the broadband satellite industry will increase on a global basis at an average annual rate of more than 11 percent during the next five years, with the fastest growth coming for consumer-class satellite broadband Internet access services like North America's WildBlue and HughesNet.
Broadband satellite Internet services and satellite IP trunking are experiencing rapid subscriber growth, which in turn translates into greater service revenue. In addition, single-site satellite broadband services have had success in markets outside of North America, like Thailand and Australia, and new service launches in Europe and possibly elsewhere in the world will help to generate service revenue growth in excess of 22 percent per year through 2011.
Service revenue from the IP trunking segment actually will decline on a global basis as demand for trunking continues to shift from satellite to undersea cable and fiber, the group says, though some regional markets like Africa will see positive gains in the coming years as demand continues to grow in specific countries.
Solid, steady growth in classic enterprise & SME broadband VSAT services along with continued growth in shared-hub and managed services in most regions of the world will enable service revenue to increase at a steady rate through 2011. In addition, increasingly fat bandwidth pipes for existing broadband VSAT networks will increase service revenues as companies take advantage of standardization to carry on adding additional IP-based applications to their enterprise networks.
Turning to customer premise equipment (CPE) sales, total CPE revenue for the entire market are forecast to remain in the $400 million-$500 million range per year through 2011. The declining CPE cost will be one of the key factors in driving up subscriber uptake for single site satellite broadband Internet access services and will push growth in the enterprise & SME broadband VSAT networking segment as well.
Another trend in the enterprise & SME segment is that better performance is being obtained in CPEs of lower or the same price. This is especially true as bandwidth-saving technologies like DVB-S2 and Adaptive Coding & Modulation are adopted and ever-smaller broadband VSAT networks become financially viable.
The majority of CPE revenues are generated in the enterprise & SME broadband VSAT networking segment. "Interestingly, NSR even forecasts CPE revenues to decline substantially in a number of regional markets. Again, this is a positive sign that does not point to slowing demand for services but a lowering of one of the important cost barriers to broadband satellite services uptake" - as per the report.

JOOST is out - Is IPTV in next stage of its evolution ?

Joost (pronounced "juiced"), the free IPTV service launched by the same crew of wizards who crafted Skype, this morning announced its commercial launch - replete with a cast of 32 big-name advertisers and content from such top-tier sources as CNN and Sony Pictures.
Joost, developed last year in stealth under the code name "The Venice Project," emerged from hiding in January. It's the brainchild of Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who technically still are eBay employees, on the job ever since eBay bought Skype for $2.5 billion.

Its reported that ads from some of the 32 advertisers already on board - a list that includes the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, HP, Intel and Nike - will start appearing immediately along with Joost content. By the end of the month, all will be on board. Similarly, only about 25 channels are available today but, by the end of this week, the total is supposed to expand to more than 150.

In a separate statement, Joost disclosed five of those content deals, starting with a pact with the Turner Broadcasting System for the broadcast (or Web cast or perhaps JoostCast?) of content including "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and "Robot Chicken." There also will be CNN news programs and talk shows. Sony, meanwhile, will bring what was described as "classic programming from the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties to Joost. The National Hockey League is going to offer "vintage" games along with regular season and playoff highlights - there was no indication that live games will be available.

The most content, Joost says, initially will be available to the United States only, with content limited globally by various copyright restrictions. Still, Joost appears to be the first IPTV offering delivered over the public Internet that has combined a roster of major advertisers and content providers.

The full technical details of how Joost works have not yet been disclosed but general outlines are known. They include the use of a streaming-media engine code named "anthill," the use of licensed rather than home-brewed codecs and -- perhaps the crowning touch -- the use of a modified version of the absolutely free Mozilla browser code (best known as the code behind Firefox and/or Netscape).
Right now, Joost only works on broadband-connected PCs, although the longer-term plan is for it to work on regular TVs with some sort of set-top box arrangement.
In January, when Joost's existence was disclosed, analyst house Ovum said it had learned that Joost generates, on average, 320 MB of download and 105 MB of upload traffic per hour's viewing. Ovum calls that "a pretty hefty amount of traffic," adding it "means that the service will not be suitable for anyone with a bandwidth cap or fair-use agreement from their broadband provider." Such caps are common outside of the United States and, unbeknownst to most American broadband subscribers, fair-use agreements often are buried in carriers' terms of service.

Free broadband to all Indians?

The government of India is considering a radical scheme under which it will provide free broadband and landline phone service to all Indians, paid for by billions of dollars in telecom taxes now just sitting idle in the bank.
The free broadband would be at 2 Mb/s.
In India, as elsewhere around the world, the phone companies have been reporting declining numbers of landline subscribers. The free service could start rolling out as quickly as 2009. Government owned Indian phone companies Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) would provide the free service. Those two companies already provide the vast majority of all of Indian broadband. By the end of this year they are expected to account for 7 million out of 9 million DSL lines in the country, according to Indian government plans, which call for a massive xDSL rollout this year. There were only 2.3 million CSL lines in the country at the end of last year, of which BSNL accounted for almost half.
With landline service - for those who still want it - and broadband free, India's phone companies would be expected to look to various unspecified value-added services for their revenue, according to the government plan. "The move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it," said the Indiatimes.
Funding the plan, and paying for a nationwide fiber optic network to be built and run by Department of Telecom (DoT), will be India's Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) into which all telecom operators in India cough up 5 percent of their annual revenues. Estimates are that as of the end of March the USOF stood at over $2.2 billion, of which only part would be needed to pay for the plan.

US to reach 50% broadband penetration by year end

U.S. may finally reach that 50% mark for broadband penetration by the end of the year. High Speed Internet connections grew by 20% last year hitting 47% of all U.S. households.
While it is good news that broadband penetration is becoming a mainstay in the American home, US still lags behind Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Korea, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada, the UK and Belgium in per-capita broadband deployment. The U.S. still lags greatly in the number of fiber connections with just over 500,000 while countries like Japan have 6 million or more.

China Mobile now has 306.10 million customer base

China Mobile, the Hong Kong-listed unit of China's largest mobile carrier by subscribers, has reported that it added 4.86 million customers in January, up from 4.83 million new subscribers in December.

The monthly addition was the largest China Mobile has reported to date.
The carrier said 4.54 million of its new customers in January were prepaid subscribers and 324,000 were contract customers.
The January additions raised China Mobile's total number of subscribers to 306.10 million, from 301.23 million at the end of December.

China Mobile's smaller rival, China Unicom, reportedly added 1.38 million subscribers in January, taking its total number of mobile customers to 143.74 million.

Fixed-mobile convergence - The new kid on the street

One of the latest phenomemn in telecom sector is fixed-mobile convergence.
ABI Research has found that, by 2011, some 250 million users will be making and receiving phone calls over converged fixed-mobile networks and access points, and the firm expects capital expenditure in fixed-mobile convergence infrastructure to exceed $450 million by 2011. That equates to around 10 percent of households and 8 percent of enterprises using some form of fixed-mobile convergence access point on the premises. This will include UMA and SIP-based solutions, both supporting voice call continuity.

There are several competing technologies for fixed-mobile convergence including use of UMA to aggregate traffic from femtocells and Wi-Fi access points in the home, and picocells in the office. In the longer term, IMS-based solutions will be deployed using SIP to offer rich voice sessions over converged devices.

325 Million subscribers use CDMA2000?

According to the CDMA Development Group, there were 100 million new CDMA2000 subscriber adds in 2006. Today, there are more than 325 million CDMA2000 subscribers, including 55 million CDMA2000 1xEV-DO broadband subscribers, representing a 125-percent increase in EV-DO subscribers from the previous year. Including cdmaOne, there are now more than 370 million CDMA subscribers worldwide, with most of the growth coming from the Asia Pacific region, followed by North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The group also reports more than 100 operators have deployed CDMA2000 in the past three years, including 47 CDMA2000 1xEV-DO networks. As many as 40 of these operators had been GSM carriers.

VoIP - Giants battling for patents

Vonage is facing Verizon in the U.S. District Court in - with Verizon claiming patent rights to key technology used by Vonage and possibly many others in the industry. Verizon is charging Vonage with violation of seven of its patents. The patents cover a broad swath of VoIP technology, including the completion of calls between VoIP users and the public network, authentication of VoIP callers, validating VoIP callers' accounts, monitoring VoIP usage, fraud protection, enhanced features, and the use of Wi-Fi.

At the same time reports have started spreading through the industry that Vonage is launching an annual pre-paid VoIP plan in a move some theorize is designed to generate some fast cash, and that the VoIP house is also about to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).

Verizon filed its suit in June. In July 2006, Vonage said it had acquired three VoIP-related patents from Digital Packet Licensing that address compression techniques related to the public network, a move seen as an attempt to find technology work-arounds to the Verizon patents if they are upheld.
In the extreme, should Verizon win, then Vonage could theoretically be forced to shut down its VoIP service. Such an outcome, though, could typically take years of litigation, and few industry observers expect that to happen. The most likely outcome is thought to be a license payment from Vonage if it loses, or is losing, the case. Estimates are also that, if it knocks off Vonage, Verizon will then go out after as many other VoIP industry players as it can get its hands on.

Vonage is expected to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).

Vodafone in India - The rough road ahead

Background

Vodafone, already the world's largest cellular carrier, is getting control of India's fourth-largest operator with about 24 million customers and 16.4 percent of the market. Vodafone says its target now is to garner between 20-percent and 25-percent market share by 2012. Assuming all needed regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close in the second quarter. Hutch-Essar becomes Vodafone's third largest unit, following its German operations and its 45-percent minority stake in Verizon Wireless in the United States. However, the German and U.S. markets are mostly saturated - 80 percent in Germany and 76 percent in the United States - while the Indian market is only 15-percent penetrated, and it's the world's fastest-growing cellular market right now, with a reported 6.5 million new subscribers per month.

The immediate issues

Vodafone's acquisition of Hutchison's share of Hutch-Essar also comes with certain complications that vodafone has to deal with. The first is the Indian law that prohibits foreign entities from holding more than 74 percent of an Indian telecom company. In terms of the foreign-ownership limits, Vodafone reportedly has deals set up to cover that issue as well. Hutchison Telecom had local partners that, between them, hold a 15-percent interest in Hutch-Essar. Those partners have agreed to retain their holdings, Vodafone says, leaving Vodafone's interest at 52 percent after the deal is completed, just enough for it to have full operational control over the operator plus leaving enough leeway for it to buy the 33-percent Essar stake. Vodafone offered to buy out Essar's stake, paying the same price it paid Hutchison. According to Vodafone, if Essar accepts its buyout offer, it already has local minority partners lined up and willing to buy as much as 26 percent of the company.

The second is its 10-percent stake in rival celco Bharti Airtel, an ownership position that came with a noncompete agreement when it bought that stake for $1.5 billion in 2005. Vodafone said Bharti has agreed buy the 5.6 percent of that stake that represents direct control, with Vodafone keeping a 4.4-percent indirect stake as an investment but having no management or operations position in the carrier. It appears Vodafone comes out smelling like a rose in the deal - Bharti is going to pay it $1.6 billion, so Vodafone both shows a little profit on its original investment and has the 4.4-percent stake almost as a free gift. Vodafone seems to have granted deferred payment terms for the 5.6% stake over the next 18 months. This leaves Voda with an indirect stake of 4.4% worth around US$1.3bn based upon an initial investment of US$0.8bn for the whole of the 10% stake. In addition, Vodafone announced an agreement with Bharti to share network infrastructure in India to cut costs. As part of this transaction, Voda has immediately allayed fear about the capital costs of roll-out of rural GSM in India. It seems that the #3 (Hutch Essar) and #1 (Bharti) will share infrastructure and which will make the investment look at lot more attractive than rolling out infrastructure solo. This potentially gives this partnership a huge advantage over the #1 CDMA operator, Reliance, and the state owned #2, BSNL and MTNL, in the GSM market.

Vodafone's immediate strategy will focus on -

improving the market performance at Hutch Essar: the Vodafone targets a market share (presumably by revenue) of 25% by FY2012

Rolling out the Voda brand and services

Rolling out the network to the 6 circles where there is currently no service.

In the medium to long term, Vodafone will strategise to look at acquiring some of the smaller Indian GSM players to gain market share. Ultimately, the aim must be to be #1 in the market.

Vodafone Group will invest $2 billion in India in the next few years. "I think there will be consolidation in the India market in the near term," Vodafone CEO Mr. Sarin said. "India will be the biggest country for Vodafone in terms of number of subscribers," he said, adding the company will reach a subscriber base of 100 million in the country in the next few years. Sarin didn't specify when he would hit the 100 million target, but said he will achieve faster subscriber growth and a higher subscriber base as a result of roll out in newer circles, or service areas. The companies strategy will be to roll out new services so that the ARPUs increase over next few years (though this remains a very challenging task). The ARPU boost can come from introduction of new services, such as mobile banking in India. On Monday Vodafone announced it would work with Citigroup to develop M-PESA, a mobile phone money transfer application across the world. Sarin pointed out that in many emerging markets - such as India and Africa - mobile phones provide the only way to transact with a bank.

Shapes of things to come - Vodafone & Bharti enter into deal to share backhaul

Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, in his webcast address on Monday said that infrastructure sharing would enable the UK-based major to save over $1 billion over the next 5 years and also contribute to an addition of 1.5% to its EBITDA margins. In its deal with Bharti, Vodafone has suggested sharing of infrastructure with Bharti. With Bharti and Vodafone having taken the concept of infrastructure sharing to the next level, all eyes are now on the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. This is because Indian telecom companies are not allowed to share active infrastructure such as optic and feeder fibre cables, radio links, network elements, backhaul, antenna and transmission equipment. At present, Indian telecom companies are permitted to share only passive infrastructure such as towers, repeaters, shelters and generators. But Trai in its upcoming recommendations is likely to suggest that these norms be relaxed.

This concept can translate into big capex and opex savings only if telecom companies are allowed to share both active and passive infrastructure. Trai as well operators feel an extended version of the concept, where radio access networks of operators are shared, can lead to better utilisation of network resources as well as offer increased intra-circle roaming. While passive sharing enables telecom companies to share over 30% in both capex and opex spendings, service providers said that this figure could touch 50% if active infrastructure sharing is allowed.

Active infrastructure sharing will enable operators to provide mobile services to their subscribers wherever their own network signal is not available and help them increase their coverage area and quality of service (QoS) with almost no additional expenditure. Sources also said Trai is examining whether license condition needs to be modified to permit resale of point-to-point bandwidth for limited purpose of backhaul sharing.

Put simply, the savings will not be so significant and Bharti Airtel and Vodafone be able to roll-out joint networks in virgin areas if active infrastructure cannot be shared by operators. Little wonder that Bharti in its communication to Trai on this issue has pointed out that "while, existing license conditions allow passive infrastructure sharing among service providers, however, it has not helped actually translating it into infrastructure sharing to the desirable extent.

Is the Indian broadband market falling behind the global trend

Even the residential customers in African countries like Morocco are getting more than 4 Mbps broadband. As the graph below shows already in about 10 countries the residential customers are offered speeds 2 Mbps. (Source ITU report)

High-speed residential Internet access is reaching Africa, with the launch of 2 and 4 Mbps broadband offers in 2006 by the Moroccan ISP Casanet, a 100%-owned subsidiary of Maroc Telecom, through its portal Menara.

Maroc Telecom has just released its annual results for 2006, with around 384,000 ADSL subscribers, the lion's share of Morocco's broadband market. The Moroccan regulator is seeking to partially unbundle the local loop. New entrants such as Meditel and Maroc Connect will be able to use the incumbent's copper cable to offer alternative ADSL services in competition with Maroc Telecom’s offers.

The roll-out of a 4 Mbps offer is just part of the march of higher-speed offers throughout Africa (see graph below).

This analysis is part of the this year's World Information Society Report, to be published on World Information Society Day, 17 May 2007.

Source - The ITU website

Ericsson all set to dominate the wireless broadband market

Ericsson has launched close to a hundred HSPA networks across the world. HSPA has been established as the preferred technology for mobility and wireless broadband.
With some 125 HSPA enabled devices, including some 50 HSPA mobile phone models, Ericsson is today managing networks with more than 100 million subscribers.

5 Gbps transmission rate tested in 4G by DoCoMo

NTT DoCoMo announced Friday (9th Feb 07) that it achieved a maximum packet transmission rate of approximately 5Gbps in the downlink using 100MHz frequency bandwidth to a mobile station. .The field experiment of fourth-generation (4G) radio access took place in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on December 25, 2006.
DoCoMo has already tested a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps on December 14, 2005.
The 5 Gbps speed was achieved by increasing the number of MIMO transmitting and receiving antennas from six to 12 each, and by using proprietary received signal processing technology.As compared with the December 14, 2005 test, the frequency spectrum efficiency, or the ratio of data transmission rate to channel bandwidth, was also doubled from 25bps/Hz to 50bps/Hz (5Gbps/100MHz).
The caveate as of now is that the test was done for mobile station moving only at speed fo 10km/h

Does WiMAX has a big future?

I have been writing on this blog about the growth of WiMax and have given lot of latest figures on no. of WiMAX users. But a recent major analytical study has concluded that, despite all the hype, the technology being marketed as WiMAX is going to be just a niche player in the mobile wireless market over the next half decade. I would like to hear your comments on this -
The latest study, by Arthur D. Little, compares High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and WiMAX, and concludes WiMax will capture "at most 15 percent of this network equipment market and perhaps 10 percent of mobile broadband wireless subscribers by 2011-2012."
Other research houses including Strategy Analytics, which recently estimated that WiMAX would win at best 6 percent of the world market by 2010, also have similiar opinions. The findings of study are based on interviews with 31 HSPA and WiMax equipment vendors, operators running the networks, government regulators and financial investors around the globe.
"The momentum in HSDPA deployments has been stimulated by competition from other broadband wireless technologies and by the prospect of competition from mobile WiMax," says Michael Natusch, head of Arthur D. Little's UK TIME (Telecoms, IT, Media and Electronics) practice. "However, there is as yet no convincing real-world evidence of the actual relative performances of these technologies in large scale deployments. Nevertheless, it is likely that these two technologies will achieve comparable levels of performance in typical real-world situations, contrary to the notion that mobile WiMax should be regarded as a 'killer' technology."
In mobile WiMAX's favor, Little in its study does note that "WiMax systems are expected to achieve significantly greater theoretical peak data transfer rates when deployed than today's commercial HSPA networks deliver now." It cites thoretical speeds of 16.8 Mb/s in urban areas compared to 2-3 Mb/s for HSPA. A bigger issue, though, it says is that "the coverage a WiMax base station can achieve, is substantially lower than HSPA, hence HSPA operators will be able to deploy a smaller number of base stations and sites to cover the same geography." The result is that "radio access network Capex for current WiMax technology can significantly exceed HSDPA capex."
That issue may be a WiMAX-killer, because "an HSPA operator will be able to match its growing investment more clearly to the development of demand than mobile WiMax operators who will have to install more cell sites at the beginning to ensure coverage."
Looking further out into the future, and the battle between Mobile WiMAX advocates the HSPA community and its 3G LTE, Little isn't making any solid predictions. "The long term future relative roles of 3G LTE and mobile WiMax, both of which face major development hurdles before they achieve the full promise of new, so-called 4G systems, is uncertain and will be influenced by continuing expected shifts in the priorities and competitive alignments of major players in the wireless industry which has undergone a number of consolidations in recent months," Little concludes.

Source - Telecomweb

265 million wireless users in India by 2010

India's adoption of wireless communications is moving faster than anticipated, with predictions spiking to more than 265 million users by 2010 from more than 100 million today.
According to research firm In-Stat, the subcontinent's wireless carriers will continue to rake in profits, even though Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) levels have declined significantly and that downward trend is expected to continue, due to intense competition. The list of rivals includes Bharti Airtel, BSNL, Reliance, Hutchison and Idea Cellular (which is shopping its IPO around . Combined, these players accounted for about 84 percent of the subscriber base in 2005. The company says ARPU in India is one of the lowest in the world and could fall to $5.60 by 2010.

Source - Telecomweb

Future of Wi-Fi in India

The Wi-Fi Alliance, in partnership with Tonse Telecom, released a 60-page report "The Future for Wi-Fi in India: Opportunities and Challenges," outlining the emerging Wi-Fi ecosystem in India. The group predicts that as laptop adoption and broadband penetration increase, Wi-Fi will experience the wide adoption already seen in other markets.
Key findings in the paper include:
>>As broadband wireless access grows, the WLAN network gear sector will exceed $275 million by 2012 (not including embedded chips), up from the current $23.1 million.
>>The combined Wi-Fi market (described as consisting of WLAN networking gear, systems integration and professional services but not including embedded devices and laptops) is expected to exceed $744 million by 2012 (CAGR of more than 61 percent).
>>Hybrid Wi-Fi and WiMAX deployments are bringing broadband connectivity to previously unconnected rural and urban areas alike.
>>Dual-mode Wi-Fi /cellular handsets show promise for bringing higher-throughput Internet connectivity to numerous Indian citizens who don't own computers.

New frontiers - Broadband over Power-lines

Broadband over Power Lines, also known as the "third wire" for delivering broadband communications to users, has been gaining traction on a global basis. Since, more than 100 trials in 40 different countries worldwide have confirmed the viability of BPL technology, and visiongain sees the technology building momentum. Find out what market impact BPL will have by buying this latest visiongain report, "Broadband over Power line: Challenging existing broadband dynamics".
One of the advantages offered by BPL is that the technology will help stimulate new competitive market dynamics by introducing a new means of broadband access that does not require the building of an entirely new infrastructure.

BPL has been hampered by concerns over interference and the lack of standards necessary to drive it forward. But recent developments point to these problems being resolved. Visiongain believes the questions of BPL-caused RF interference have recently begun to be answered satisfactorily. Further, movements by various global standards bodies promises to boost the market.

The ubiquity of electric power lines as the means of providing access to the Internet is of particular benefit in rural areas, where the biggest promise lies for BPL. But visiongain warns that unless governments are willing to subsidise the substantial infrastructure costs required to enable a BPL system, the technology of providing broadband access over power lines may not be economically viable in these areas.
In urban areas, BPL's timing is critical, because it must compete in a very competitive marketplace, one in which legacy players have not only established a firm foothold, but are beginning to offer triple-play services, giving them differentiation and a competitive advantage. For BPL to succeed, it needs either a significant difference in service or price between BPL and existing broadband methods.

Source electronics.ca publications

WiMAX market picking-up

WiMAX has captured significant attention in the marketplace. Investors, service providers and regulators show interest in the opportunities that the technology creates for offering fixed, nomadic, and ultimately mobile broadband services. WiMAX is emerging from a legacy broadband wireless market that consisted of proprietary and, more recently, standardized fixed services (IEEE 802.16.2004) into one that offers a standardized mobile-capable technology based on the IEEE 802.16e or equivalently the 802.16.2005 standard. Companies such as Intel promote WiMAX, aiming to couple it with Wi-Fi and embed the technology in consumer electronics devices.Globally, there is significant WiMAX licensing activity, with the lion’s share of spectrum being allocated in the 3.5-GHz bands. Much of the activity is occurring in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and part of Asia-Pacific. Debate continues regarding WiMAX licensing in markets such as China and India, but mature markets such as Korea are focused on the early adoption of mobile WiMAX technology under Wireless Broadband (WiBro), which is touted as a early market profile of 802.16e technology. In North America, Sprint’s announcement to aggressively roll out mobile WiMAX (802.16e) has bolstered overall industry confidence in the future of WiMAX in mature markets. As with Korea Telecom, Sprint plans to capitalize on mobile WiMAX technology with the goal of proliferating broadband services on consumer electronic devices.WiMAX subscribers will increase worldwide from 3.40 million to 27 million between 2006 and 2011. This forecast includes both 802.16e, and pre-802.16e subscribers, which use proprietary broadband and wireless access and 802.16.2004 technologies. By 2011, of the total number of WiMAX subscribers, 25.10 million will be using 802.16e.International network infrastructure investments for WiMAX will increase from $550 million in 2006 to $3.90 billion in 2010 as service provider deployments accelerate. The network implementations of WiMAX will differ from those of traditional telecom networks, with the differences being low-cost, IP-centric transport architectures and a design emphasis on the delivery of media and applications as opposed to traditional communications

Source - Marketresearch.com